In the design and maintenance of telecommunications systems attention has been paid to establishment of connections between different systems and to smooth operation. Separate systems have often been implemented using quite a few different methods and various apparatuses which are incompatible. It has been difficult and time consuming to make different systems compatible, if at all possible.
For this reason several producers of devices and systems have developed a common architecture called CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), which allows computer systems of different types implemented with different programming languages to communicate with one another without difficulty. CORBA defines a GIOP protocol (General Inter-ORB protocol) which enables communication between devices of different types and programs programmed with different languages. The GIOP protocol is a common protocol of which a version called IIOP (Internet Inter-ORB Protocol) has been developed particularly for the Internet environment. Further information on CORBA can be obtained e.g. from the specification published by the OMG (Object Management Group) which created this architecture: The Common Object Request Broker: Architecture and Specification, Revision 2.0, Chapter 2: CORBA Overview. The specification is also available at the address www.omg.org.
CORBA has been developed for systems which have a fixed connection to one another via an unspecified network. When the protocol was designed, hardly any attention was paid to the possible capacity of the transmission path, but the emphasis was on the creation of a flexible and secure protocol. Since the proportion of wireless communication has increased strongly during the past few years, data systems and different software are also increasingly used in computers and devices from which the only or the main connection to other networks is a wireless network, such as the GSM, GPRS or UMTS. The data transmission capacity of wireless networks is, however, considerably smaller than that of fixed wired networks. For this reason CORBA has not been commonly applied to wireless systems. Transmission of CORBA over a wireless transmission path has proven to be very slow due to the large amount of signalling and data to be transmitted.
In wireless devices software applications have usually defined their own interfaces and connection protocol which have been directly involved in the actual data transmission. This is illustrated in FIG. 1. The figure shows three software applications 100 to 104 which run in a device employing a wireless connection. Each software application has a connection protocol 106 to 110 of its own which it uses to communicate with a transmission layer 112, which transmits data using a wireless connection. In this solution the applications need to communicate with the transmission layer, which makes development of the application difficult.